W.
CHAPTER III
EARLY DAYS IN LONDON
The most important influence in the early literary career of the young poet was his friendship with Dante Gabriel Rossetti. He gained not only a valued friend, who introduced him to many of the well-known writers of the time, but one who helped him in the development of his art by sound, careful criticism and kindly encouragement. His first acquaintance with the writings of the painter-poet dated from the Autumn of 1879, when on his birthday Miss Adelaide Elder had sent him a volume of poems, an incident destined to have far-reaching results. In 1899 he wrote to her:
Dear Adelaide,
Do you know why I thought of you to-day particularly, it being my birthday? For it was you who some two and twenty years ago sent me on the 12th of September a copy of a beautifully bound book by a poet with a strange name and by me quite unknown—Dante Gabriel Rossetti.
To that event it is impossible to trace all I owe, but what is fairly certain is that, without it, the whole course of my life might have been very different. For the book not only influenced and directed me mentally at a crucial period, but made me speak of it to an elderly friend (Sir Noel Paton) through whom I was dissuaded from going abroad on a career of adventure (I was going to Turkey or as I vaguely put it, Asia) and through whom, later, I came to know Rossetti himself—an event which completely redirected the whole course of my life.
It would be strange to think how a single impulse of a friend may thus have so profound a significance were it not that to you and me there is nothing strange (in the sense of incredible) in the complex spiritual interrelation of life. Looking back through all those years I daresay we can now both see a strange and in much inscrutable, but still recognisable, direction.